There are a variety of conventional approaches to securing a heatsink to a circuit board. One conventional approach involves soldering U-shaped fasteners which are supported by a plastic block to a topside of a circuit board, and then engaging ends of a spring with the soldered U-shaped fasteners. When the U-shaped fasteners and the spring are properly installed, the heatsink sits on top of an integrated circuit (IC) package mounted to the topside of the circuit board, and the middle of the spring extends across a top of the heatsink to push the heatsink in the direction of the IC package and the circuit board. As a result, the spring, in combination with the soldered U-shaped fasteners, tightly hold the heatsink to the circuit board.
It should be understood that it is very common to mount circuit board components (e.g., Area Array Packages, gull-wing devices, discrete components, etc.) using Surface Mount Technology (SMT), and that the circuitry within some of these SMT components (e.g., high speed processors, Application Specific Integrated Circuits, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, etc.) require the use of heatsinks to maintain safe operating temperatures. The SMT mounting process typically involves printing solder paste over surface mount pads of the circuit board, picking and placing the components over the printed solder paste using automated equipment, and passing the circuit board through an oven to solder the components in place.
In contrast to the above-described SMT mounting process, soldering the earlier-mentioned U-shaped fasteners to a circuit board typically involves inserting end posts of the U-shaped fasteners into plated-through holes from the topside of the circuit board (i.e., from the same the same side of the circuit board onto which the component is mounted and over which the heatsink will attach), and applying solder into the plated-through holes (e.g., manually by a technician) to form solder-in-hole-type solder joints between the U-shaped fasteners and the plated-through holes of the circuit board. Accordingly, soldering of the U-shaped fasteners typically occurs after completing the SMT mounting process.